Lead, follow, AND get out of the way!
June 22, 2022
Quit Talking and Communicate
August 29, 2022
“Humanity faces ‘collective suicide’ over climate crisis,” headlined a recent article in British news outlet The Guardian. “No nation is immune, yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction,” United Nations Secretary–General António Guterres said, presenting this warning: “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”
Indeed, the unprecedented heat wave we’re experiencing in the U.S. and other parts of the world this summer brings climate change to the forefront yet again.
It’s getting harder to find climate-change deniers these days, though some still speak of “inconclusive evidence” that its acceleration is human–caused. Nonetheless, we are witnessing the dangerous effects of climate change—extreme temperatures, increasing wildfires, prolonged drought, destructive floods and dramatic weather events—and their traumatizing effect on human and wildlife communities around the globe.
Despite the observable evidence and scientists’ warnings, contention still prevents a unified full-speed-ahead response to the growing threat of climate change. That’s a good reason for us to continue our conversation here about who’s responsible for dealing with climate change.
Individual Rights Versus Social Responsibility
I’ve observed that the question of responsibility in the U.S. often boils down to an underlying debate between individual rights and social responsibility1.
On one end of the continuum, people argue that individual rights are sacred and must be maintained at all costs in a free and democratic society. Individuals are responsible for their own interests and actions; they may choose actions to help minimize the negative effects of climate change, but “no one has the right to tell me what to do.” This view, whether conscious or not, prevails among individuals who believe they have the most to lose with societal-level actions, i.e., policies that threaten profitability of my investments/net worth and negatively affect the economy, or policies that limit my quality of life like restricted air travel, gasoline consumption, power, and water usage. Or policies requiring costly or inconvenient changes to longstanding practices that disrupt “the way we’ve always done things around here and gotten along just fine!”
On the other end of the continuum, people argue that society—individuals, corporations, public institutions, federal, state and local governments, everyone—needs to take responsibility for reducing the quantities of CO2 we (especially in prosperous nations) spew into the global atmosphere, plus take responsibility for encouraging and funding research and development of CO2-reducing inventions. The theory goes that since every human is affected by global climate change, we must work together—as a democratic society—to address climate change on multiple fronts, even if it means compromising some individual rights to do so. The question becomes: Do any of us have the “right” to destroy the planet on which we depend for sustained life?
Wherever one stands, climate change is a societal dilemma that cannot be ignored. A dilemma, by nature, has no perfect solution. We’re “caught between a rock and a hard place,” as my dad used to say. However, dilemmas can be explored, understood and acted upon among people with very diverse and even opposing points of view. Generative Communication is an alternative approach to productive human interaction and is useful for addressing dilemmas.
Generative Communication
Generative Communication (GC), as described on my website and in previous articles, offers a new way to elevate the quality and productivity of our human interaction needed to address the individual rights/social responsibility dilemma while getting on with the business of co-creating workable solutions for climate change.
Embrace Natural Complexity
A GC orientation reminds us that nothing in our complex reality is starkly black or white, right or wrong, one way or the other. Instead, things are continually moving and changing through ongoing interactions that often produce paradoxical relationships among seemingly polar opposites. GC helps us spot and work with the paradoxes—in which multiple truths can exist at the same time.
Everyone stands somewhere on the continuum of individual rights versus social responsibilities when considering climate change (or any number of polarizing issues of our day, which I’ll examine in future articles). Our stance is informed by our individual “lifeviews,” which tend to become more rigid over time and can blind us to potentially critical information that just doesn’t fit in our view.
Stay Awake with Self-awareness
Generative Communication invites us to examine and challenge the righteousness and certainty of our lifeviews. When we soften our absoluteness about a thing, we’re more open to others’ perspectives, enabling us to formulate a larger, more nuanced—and therefore, more accurate—picture of what is going on around us. We can still hold on to our core integrity, identity and what we stand for.
Welcome the Struggle
Once we begin to expand our understanding and points of view through authentic and respectful interaction, we discover we can find common ground with those with whom we disagree. In fact, it’s in the tension and energy of disagreement—if we have the courage and skill to stay with it—that the most creative ideas emerge. Instead of defending or advocating, we can take a breath, put aside our judgmental reactions and listen. We can learn from each other and work together to create new possibilities—ideas that might never have occurred to us otherwise! We can respect people’s rights while stretching into new territory of what it means to take responsibility on behalf of individuals and society at the same time.
Take Personal Responsibility
Climate change isn’t going away. We can’t ignore it. We can argue ‘til the cows come home about our rights and responsibilities, individually and collectively. Good for us! We can have insightful, productive conversations even when we disagree.
Generative Communication asks us to explore and expand our perspectives while confronting our disagreements, all the while maintaining our personal integrity. It asks us to stay awake and pay attention to what is going on (WIGO) around us, standing ready to act. It asks us to take responsibility for our own interactions and the impact they have on others and the environment. And further, it asks us to extend that responsibility to our own well-being and the vast web of life with which we are integrally connected.
The best “tool” available to us for mitigating the effects of climate change is our integrated ability to learn, think critically and communicate generatively through our everyday interactions. We may have to modulate our egos, self-interests and certainties as we genuinely seek to generate understanding, commitment, action and results—together—on behalf of the common good as well as ourselves.
Above all, we must hold ourselves accountable to engage, co-create and act together as a human community. The choice “is in our hands.”
1 Alternative terms, developed within specific contexts, that include elements of social responsibility include Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)